I always found the journal model to be one of the best scams there is. Buy our journal. Written by you. Edited by you. Referreed by you. Based on research paid for with public money. The journal contribution is to sell the paper back to the people who provide their content.
fun fact: the academic publishing business model was invented by robert maxwell. you’ve probably heard the name maxwell before, due to his daughter, ghislaine
Definitely fuck them. The largest pro-privacy, entity really, ISP in Sweden had them sued for copyright trolling. I believe that Elsevier in response blocked any Bahnhof-customers. Bahnhof blocked Elsevier traffic with this tenner: http://elsevier.bahnhof.se/.
This was a big deal when working there because Bahnhof had a track record of not honoring requests to give out personal info or blocking any sites. The CEO also secretly recorded the FRA, our equivalent to the NSA, as they were trying to make a deal under the table to be able to spy on customers. There’s even a video recreation (the server he’s holding used to host Wikileaks)!
I’m sure all the MIT lecturers are making sure to only use opensource textbooks and totally not requiring students to purchase the professor’s own authored textbook, latest edition only, right? That would be in keeping with MIT’s principles, certainly.
I mean you say that, but I went to a similar school in the US and the professor had his own book. It was cheaper than the old textbook and to top it off he “warned us” not to go to a certain site and download the PDF version. Some professors care and it’s more about the administration than their own opinions.
I wonder whether this is because the subscription method was overpriced compared to the number of articles they actually accessed or if academics are now just thinking twice about whether they really need to access a particular article if it’s not easy and “free”. I’ve certainly downloaded articles I never actually got around to reading.
It’s still wild that universities don’t just en masse refuse to use the for-profit journals. They services they provide could easily be managed and funded by a university consortium. They just need to actually make the leap.
I doubt it accounts for much, but a lot of authors pay up front now for open access. If the majority of authors did that, then subscriptions wouldn’t make sense for most people. I don’t think it’s anywhere near the majority of publications now though.
sparcopen.org
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